Wind River Enhances Simics for Agile IoT Development

30 June 2015 – Wind River®, a world leader in delivering software for the Internet of Things (IoT), has introduced the latest version of Wind River Simics®. Simics accelerates software development by delivering ground-breaking development capabilities and facilitates Agile software practices through the use of simulation technologies.

The latest updates to Simics include accelerated simulation performance and expanded capabilities for enhancing access, collaboration, and automation for software developers. Additionally, the process for modeling, debugging, and model asset reuse has been further improved to deliver a simpler user experience. Other new improvements provide additional capabilities enabling agile and automated testing with shorter feedback loops.

New features include the following:

Greater performance: Simulation performance has been enhanced for tightly coupled multi-core and multiprocessor systems on multi-core hosts. Testing on parallel workloads shows performance increases of up to seven times when simulating an eight-core Linux symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) target on an eight-core host. Coupled with its existing performance technologies, Simics can efficiently simulate ever more complex targets to deliver the benefits of simulation for any target system.

Improved modeling support: Enhanced support for SystemC models with a new SystemC library and improved debugging tools help teams get models up and running quickly.

IoT and intelligent systems are pushing the boundaries for developers, creating challenging demands such as increasingly complex designs, greater intelligence and connectivity, and tightened development schedules. As development timelines become tighter, IoT developers are turning to Agile practices, which require constant on-demand access to the system, more efficient and faster collaboration between teams, and higher levels of automation.

“IoT is pushing the embedded community to re-evaluate the development lifecycle,” said Chris Rommel, vice president for IoT and Embedded Technology at VDC Research. “The increasing scale and complexity of IoT systems are forcing developers to adapt. Agile practices are one of the methods more engineers are now using to address these process challenges and improve access, collaboration and overall development efficiencies across their teams.”

“The demands of creating IoT systems are necessitating new development processes. As innovation cycles become shorter, embedded developers must increasingly adopt Agile and continuous practices,” said Michel Genard, vice president and general manager of system simulation at Wind River (above). “Simics continues to open up new possibilities for Agile development and allows teams to accelerate their timelines, as well as successfully design and test IoT scenarios virtually impossible to replicate via traditional methods. We’re committed to constantly growing our capabilities and investigating new opportunities such as the cloud to offer innovative methods to bring our virtual environment technologies to wider audiences.”

Simics is able to simulate nearly anything from a single chip to systems of any size and complexity. It provides the access, automation, and collaboration required to implement Agile development practices and to continuously deliver better software, faster. By working from virtual models and eliminating the need for physical hardware (and its limitations) during development, simulation can accelerate development and transform how businesses operate. Developers can push automated testing much sooner in the development cycle, and perform both testing and debugging during design and prototyping phases. All team members can have unlimited access to virtual hardware, allowing new ways of working and improved collaboration throughout the entire lifecycle. Ultimately, developers can dramatically reduce risks of shipping late, overrunning budget, and sacrificing quality.

Simics is part of the Wind River Helix™ portfolio of products enabling IoT advancements. To learn more about how Wind River is addressing the opportunities and challenges of IoT, please visit www.windriver.com/products/helix/.

About Wind River
Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel® Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), is a global leader in delivering software for the Internet of Things. The company has been pioneering computing inside embedded devices since 1981, and its technology is found in more than 2 billion products. Wind River offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for addressing the system-level challenges and opportunities of IoT that is backed by world-class global professional services, award-winning customer support, and a broad partner ecosystem. Wind River delivers the software and expertise that enables the innovation and deployment of safe, secure, and reliable intelligent systems. To learn more, please visit www.windriver.com.